Maximize Entertainment On-the-Go with iPad This Holiday

It’s holiday season. Maybe you’ve got a travel planned, a long drive ahead and need to keep the kids occupied, or you just have a long train ride to work every day. We’re going to show you different ways you canmaximaize all sorts of entertainment on your iPad this holiday.

Reading

Instapaper. This is one of our top iPad apps. Instapaper is a way to save web pages to be read later, and presents them to you in a nice, easy to read layout. You can install a bookmarklet on your favorite browser to save pages for later reading, and many Mac and iOS apps will send your links to Instapaper — if the app supports it, it will have a Read Later option. Before you head out, just open the Instapaper app to download the content and you can read it even without an Internet connection.

iBooks. We’re separating iBooks from the other book reader because it’s the only one that can take the popular epub format (without DRM) and PDF files directly. This has made iBooks my preferred e-reader. If you have an e-book in another file format, you can use Calibre to convert it to epub. Once you have an epub or a PDF file, just drag the file into iTunes and sync it to your iPad. One other nice feature in iBooks is the ability to sort your files into collections.

Video

iTunes. The easiest way to get video content onto your iPad is to simply buy or rent it from the iTunes Store. You can initiate the transaction on either your computer or your iPad. Keep in mind if you copy a rental to your iPad, it won’t be available for watch on your computer, and if you rent a video on your iPad, it can’t be copied to the Mac. This FAQ from Apple has more information on rentals. To copy videos to your iPad, select your iPad in the sidebar in iTunes, choose the Movies (or TV Shows) tab, and choose what videos you want copied. To watch them, simply launch the Videos app on your iPad. This method of transfer is also how you’ll copy movies you convert in this next step.

DVD to iPad Converter and iPad Video Converter. They are all great iPad converters. They can convert most encrypted DVDs and any videoyou may have that’s not in the .mp4 file format. Choose the Universal preset on the right, press Start and let ‘er, um, convert.

Games for the whole family

The Angry Birds is fun and all, beside it, there are many great games you can play with your family, too. The games can all be played on a single iPad via pass-and-play mode.

Scrabble. This is one of my favorite iPad apps. One of the great features it has is if everyone playing the game has an iPod Touch or an iPhone, you can download the free Scrabble Tile Rack app. This lets each player keep his or her tiles on their device, and you can leave the iPad in the center of the table. Scrabble also lets you Pass-N-Play as well as connect via Facebook. No Game Center support, sadly.

These are our choices for basic approaches to getting entertainment on your iPad.Let us know in the comments if you have other options.